My concern would be whether or not either party - or another party - will try again to go after BSD. As far as I know, their last attempt to discredit the 1993 AT&T/BSD settlement failed - but being desperate now, who knows what tricks they'll try.

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Isn't Mach technically a copy of UNIX as well, or rather re-implementation. I'm sure most of you know that Mach is the kernel developed by CMU as the replacement for the BSD kernel. Only OS X and Tru64 UNIX use it. Honestly, I don't see a point to the differentiation between BSD, Solaris, Linux and others. They're all Unix, not UNIX, but Unix. Yes, there is a glaring difference between Linux distribution development ideology and BSD, Solaris, and other's development ideologies. They're polar opposites. While one employs tight control with a focus on F/OSS, most Linux distributions with the exception of Debian and Slackware and possibly others, are fairly loose. However, they all function quite similarly and are generally cross-compatible.

My concern would be whether or not either party - or another party - will try again to go after BSD.

I doubt it. The early BSD got clearance from Mother Unix (namely, AT&T), so at that point there was no issue. It would have to be argued that some Unix code came back into the BSDs. That is really a stretch. I'd bet that the BSD we have today can be traced back to the original one at the time of the consent decree; the newer stuff would have a terrible burden of proof to show that it came from Unix and not the other way round (namely, from BSD -> Unix).

If I were the attorney, I would request dismissal with prejudice, and for sanctions.

And that's just it- SCO wasn't a big company. They went down the slash-and-burn litigious path because they weren't bringing in the dough in other avenues, like actual products- if they had been, they might not have become the ugly cancer on the community they became. No matter, though, now that that cancer is likely in permanent remission.

But this also goes back to how the code in your OS-of-choice is licensed. If it's consisting of binary blobs from commercial companies, full of NDA's and such, then you risk one day having another SCO-like situation rear it's ugly head. If you run something like OpenBSD (shameless plug, I know) then you pretty much avoid this risk altogether in the first place.